Former US President Donald Trump has been indicted by a New York grand jury over allegations that he paid hush money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Daniels claims that she and Trump had sex in 2006. A decade later, just before the 2016 US presidential election, Trump paid her $130,000 in exchange for her silence about the encounter. The former Republican president has denied these charges, insisting he is “completely innocent” ever since the allegations surfaced in 2018.
Here is a timeline of the Donald Trump-Stormy Daniels scandal:
In her 2018 tell-all book "Full Disclosure," Daniels says she met Donald Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in July 2006. The tournament was at Lake Tahoe. Daniels, then 27, was working as a “greeter” when she met Trump, then a 60-year-old real estate tycoon and reality TV star.
A picture taken at the time shows them posing together -- Trump in a red hat, Daniels in a black top -- at a porn studio booth where she was the greeter.
Daniels has claimed that one of Trump’s bodyguards invited her to have dinner with Trump at his penthouse hotel room. There they had what “may have been the least impressive sex I'd ever had,” she wrote in her account. This was in 2006, when Trump’s third wife, Melania, had just given birth to their son. She had not accompanied her husband to the charity golf tournament.
According to BBC, an interviewer once asked Daniels if Trump had asked her to keep shut about their alleged encounter at the time. “He didn't seem worried about it. He was kind of arrogant,” she said.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, claims that she kept in touch with Trump over the next one year in hopes of making it to his reality show. That never happened.
In 2011, the porn star agreed to give an interview to In Touch magazine about the affair. She says that shortly after she agreed to the interview, a stranger approached her and her baby in a car park and told her to “leave Trump alone.” The interview took place, but it was not published in full until 2018.
Meanwhile, in 2016, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for US president. Daniels claims that his lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid her $130,000 in "hush money" so she would not go public with the affair.
Cohen, who has since turned against Trump, has acknowledged arranging a $130,000 "hush money" payment to Daniels in exchange for her silence about the 2006 tryst.
Daniels said she took the money because she was worried about her own safety and the safety of her family.
The payment was revealed by The Wall Street Journal in January 2018 and forms the basis for the charges Trump faces.
(With inputs from AFP)
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